Introducing the new, revised CC204

February 8, 2011 at 5:52 pm

The faculty in Core Social Sciences have introduced an exciting new version of CC204 (second-semester Social Sciences) on the theme of “Inequality.” Prof. Thornton Lockwood provided the following description of the course:

Over the last two years, major changes have been going on with the second semester of Core Social Sciences. In the fall semester of 2009, the faculty decided that the social sciences should take on a thematic unity—more specifically, a thematic focus on all the ways that contemporary social science examines inequality. The new CC204 was rolled out in Spring 2010, a course focused especially on inequality in global development and on the bases of class, race, gender, and nation states. Based on student feedback, the Core faculty then devoted the summer of 2010 to further tweaking the readings and streamlining the lecture structure. The result is a highly polished course which incorporates twentieth-century social science classics such as W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folks (1903), Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1963) and Stephen J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1981), as well as twenty-first century, cutting-edge research on education, inequality in two-income families, color-blind racism, and the geopolitical effects of European colonialism.

A PDF version of the new CC204 syllabus can be found here. Feel free to compare to syllabi from previous semesters: Spring 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006. The list of required texts for the current semester can be found on the Core books page. In coming weeks on the Core blog, faculty and students will be contributing further thoughts on the curricular changes in CC204, and reflecting on their experience teaching and exploring this new wealth of intellectual material. Stay tuned!

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